FRONTLINE|August 5, 2016

Economic growth in the last 25 years after liberalisation has been riding on a credit bubble. It has not made the manufacturing or exports sector robust, unlike in other high-growth economies. Nor has it delivered any benefits to those steeped in poverty and deprivation.

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AT AN OUTSOURCING CENTRE in Bengaluru, working across international time zones.

JULY 1991 IS WIDELY SEEN AS A WATERSHED month in Indian economic policymaking. That was when the Indian government declared that it was unwinding the interventionist regime which had been in place since Independence, involving controls on economic agents, regulation of markets, a large public sector and an a priori plan as to how economic resources should be allocated. In the period to follow, policy, it was then argued, would dismantle this excessively interventionist framework and establish and support a system driven by private initiative and relatively unfettered markets, with minimal regulation and control. The state was to transform itself from being a regulator of the market economy to being a facilitator of the functioning of the market mechanism.

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